Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, February 01, 2022

एकशिंग्या सिंधू संस्कृतीमधील बागेत....James Thurber, Satyajit Ray and The Indus Valley Civilisation

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Modesty of History”:

“A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.”

जेम्स थर्बर या महान कलावंताने 'The Unicorn in the Garden' या नावाची गोष्ट द न्यू यॉर्कर मध्ये १९३९ मध्ये प्रसिद्ध केली. त्याची नंतर ऍनिमेशन फिल्म झाली: १९५३.

युनिकॉर्न हे नाव सिंधू संस्कृतीशी निगडीत आहे...

“...A puzzling, one-horned animal is very frequently depicted on the seals (over 60 per cent of the Mohenjo-daro seals and around 46 per cent of the Harappan), and is also modelled in several one-horned terracotta figurines (from Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Chanhu-daro). It is generally termed a ‘unicorn’, a creature legendarily associated with India by ancient Greek writers; its zoological identity, if it actually existed, is much debated....” (Andrew Robinson , ‘The Indus: lost civilizations’, 2015)

शिवाय सत्यजित रे यांचा ह्या सगळ्याशी संबंध असा:

“...About the aesthetic quality of the Indus seals there is virtual unanimity. Wheeler’s admiration has already been mentioned. Marshall considered the best seals to be ‘distinguished by a breadth of treatment and a feeling for line and plastic form that has rarely been surpassed in glyptic art’. Piggott – no admirer of Indus aesthetics, as we know – nonetheless conceded that the seals were ‘frequently carved with a brilliant sureness of touch’. Independent India’s great artist Satyajit Ray – a graphic designer and illustrator who became a writer and celebrated film director – was so enchanted by the seals that he wrote a short story inspired by the ‘unicorn’. Speaking for myself, I first became interested in the Indus civilization after seeing its seals...” (ibid)

(Ray’s ‘Ek Shringo Abhijan’, adventure of Professor Shonku:

“Shonku goes to Tibet, to find out about a Unicorn which is reported to be seen there. In the adventure, Shonku discovers a place where everybody's dreams come true... a Utopia.”)